Megabyte
announced future winners in the SSD market, based on the world's
biggest focus group for SSDs.

Who are the top 10
most important SSD manufacturers - the companies which you absolutely have to
look at if you've got got any new projects involving SSDs? And who are the
companies most likely to dominate this market?

As this is the 11th
quarterly update in this series I've cut out most of the preamble which
previously introduced this article. Check out the theory and rationale behind
this method in earlier editions.

StorageSearch.com believes that
search volume data - is the best way to get near real-time indications
of which way things are heading in the SSD market - when that volume is
based on tracking the biggest focus group of movers and shakers in the SSD
market.

Fusion-io is the only company so far to have achieved
that feat. (In
2008Memoright achieved 3
consecutive #1 listings - due to its performance leadership at that time in
the 2.5" SSD market.)

Fusion-io's current success was helped by
the company's strong brand awareness and partnerships in the PCIe SSD segment -
which was the #1 most popular form factor based on search volume throughout the
4th quarter of 2009 (having knocked
2.5" SSDs off the
#1 slot in September 2009.)

To give you an idea of the commanding lead
of being in the #1 slot - Fusion-io's search score was nearly 4x that of
#10 ranked Intel.

In
October 2009 -
Fusion-io published a
case
study showing how their ioDrive
SSDs helped MySpace reduce server
count, claim back 50% rack space while increasing application performance
(compared to its legacy SAS RAID system) and massively decreasing electrical
power. As a result of this initial project - MySpace plans to replace all
remaining 1,770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their
end-of-life.

Foremay's
fast rise in this quarter was due to product announcements related to both of
the most popular SSD form factors - 2.5" SSDs and PCIe SSDs.

In
my view it's very difficult - or maybe even impossible - for any single
company to retain a commanding technical lead in 2 of the hottest segments of
the SSD market. But what these results show is that if you have popular sounding
products in several segments then the accumulated reader interest does add up.
This is one of the factors which has helped
STEC in years gone by.

Supporting both x8 and x16
slots - R/W performance is upto 1.5 GB/s and 1.3 GB/s respectively. Both MLC and
SLC models are available. Capacities range from 128GB to 4TB. Sequential R/W
IOPS is up to 90,000/80,000. Random R/W IOPS is up to 27,000/12,000.

Features
include power outage protection, dual PCIe configuration through a built-in
PCIe RAID controller, and active garbage collection. OS support includes
Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux, and UNIX.

In November 2009 -
Foremay announced it is
shipping the world's
fastest 2.5" SATA flash SSDs.
The
SC199 Cheetah Y-Series has R/W speeds up to 290/280 MB/s in
2.5" and
3.5" SATA form
factors - which approaches the theoretical speed limit of the SATA-II protocol.
It also delivers impressive R/W IOPS of up to 50,000/45,000 respectively.

STEC has been in
the top 5 rankings for 9 out of the last 11 quarters. Its highest rank, #1,
was in 2007 Q2.

In
this quarter (2009 Q4) STEC was shipping the
fastest2.5" and
3.5" SSDs. Both
are SAS SSDs with
80,000 IOPS random read, 40,000 IOPS random write and R/W transfer speeds of
550MB/s and 300MB/s respectively. Being at the top of the performance class
always helps to attract interest and the company's PR machine continued to
churn out stories about
oem deals and
partnerships.

In November 2009STEC disclosed that its
biggest customer, EMC,
hadn't sold as many of its SSDs as expected - and
will
carry inventory into 2010. If this was a surprise to anyone it's only
because they didn't read my analysis (published April 1, 2009) which appeared
in the 8th quarterly
edition of the top 10 SSD oems in which I explicitly warned about STEC's
over reliance on partners like EMC who were adding very little added value to
their SSD offerings - and underperforming in the rackmount SSD market.

A
legal company called Brower Piven said it was
considering a class action
lawsuit against
STEC regarding what it
called "misleading statement(s) to investors" (earlier this year)
regarding the state of design wins and oem potential business related to STEC's
ZeusIOPS.

If you look
at the list of SSD
white papers on WD's site - it's no coincidence they are all about various
aspects of storage
reliability and data integrity. WD has continued along the same groove as
the founders of SiliconSystems which started marketing SSDs in 2004.

The
SSD business unit founders have always had an obsession with reliability.

They told me back in 2004 that having a bullet proof reputation for dependable
operation would be a higher priority for them to achieve long term success in
the SSD (hard disk replacement) market - than having the cheapest or fastest
products.

That was many years before most people in the industry
realized that not all flash SSDs were created equal. That field proven
reputation (based on millions of working SSDs) coupled with increased
investments in long term reliability programs scaled up after WD's acquisition
create more confidence in oem designers than Powerpoint presentations from
new SSD startups talking about projected lifetimes which are extrapolated from
a handful of working prototypes.

SandForce's ranking in these tables went down in the same
quarter that its business revenue was shooting up into the early part
of the hockey-stick curve. So you may ask where's the correlation?

Well
it's precisely those high rankings in these tables starting from
2009 Q2 - when the
company exited stealth mode - which predicted the bursting bag of design wins
which followed.

I've commented before that it's unnatural for an SSD
SoC company to be so famous. Now that everyone in the industry knows who
SandForce is - and what their technology is about - SandForce can go back to
concentrate their communication messages on SSD designers (their real
customers) and don't need to worry quite so much about visibility to their
customers' customers.

I'm sure we'll see occasional flare-ups in
interest in SandForce again in the future, for example if and when they
announce a 500MB/s SATA SSD kit, or expand into the PCIe SSD market or get
acquired. (These are all hypothetical examples BTW - just to demonstrate the
range of events which can lead to sustained search spikes for this type of
company.)

Even if SandForce drops further down this list - it has
still achieved the success of being the best known merchant market SSD SoC
company. It doesn't need to be any better known for its business model to work -
unless it changes course and decides to compete directly with its customers by
marketing its own brand of SSDs.

In October 2009 -
SandForce published a
new article - here on StorageSearch.com.
It's called - Data
Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design. Written by Kent Smith
Senior Director, Product Marketing at SandForce - the article describes what's
needed inside the next generation of fast flash SSDs to ensure data integrity
and to eliminate the risk of "silent errors."

Also in October 2009 -
Texas Memory Systemsannounced
that its RamSan-620 - (2U
5TB SLC flash SSD, price $220,000 approx) - achieved a
record
setting SPC-1 result. It produced 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS with average
response time of 0.72mS and at a cost of only $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS - which is
better than any competing RAID or Flash solution.

When I wrote the headline summary for the year 2005 in
SSD Market
History - it was "Samsung declares SSDs a strategic market".

In May 2005 when reporting this news I commented - "This is the first
time in this phase of the SSD market's development that a multibillion dollar
company (Samsung's 2004 revenue was $55.2 billion ) has entered the market.

It has not been an easy task to transition one of the world's largest
makers of flash memory into one of the largest makers of SSDs. Upto 2006 the
parts costs for all SSDs were dominated by the cost of memory. But as memory
costs came down users showed they were still willing to pay a premium for
higher performance products. In 2007 in the 2.5" SSD market - the
popularity of a
succession of products from
Adtron,
Mtron and
Memoright
demonstrated that if designers could offer higher capacity or faster SSDs in a
given form factor (and preferably both) they could command higher prices and
bigger markets.

In today's server acceleration market - the most
important subsystem which determines the personality, performance and
marketability of an SSD is the
SSD controller and
interface - and not the price of the attached memory.

For many years
Samsung's controller technology was average and far below the best available in
the industry. That meant it couldn't get the best prices for its SSDs. It has
tried to fix this problem - with variable success - by acquisition and
technology partnerships. But Samsung still has many strategic gaps in its SSD
business - which make its products vulnerable to supplier substitution.

SanDisk's
highest rank in these tables was the #1 slot - which it attained in
2007 Q3.

SanDisk
is the leading company in advancing the use of
MLC technology in
SSDs, a technology which it inherited from it acquisition of SSD pioneer
M-Systems in 2006.

Despite occasional talk about "enterprise SSDs" - SanDisk is
culturally rooted in the consumer electronics market. That's a very
competitive market in which few companies are making profits. In the past year
or so SanDisk has tried to differentiate itself from other SSD makers by hinting
about the future possibilities of scaling MLC SSDs to x4. The difficulties of
producing workable devices are something I discussed in a spoof article (March
2008 ) about XLC technology.
This is a zone where physics, manufacturability and data integrity collide with
different agendas.

Intel has already earned itself a
negative reputation in the SSD market due to variety of factors including:-
shipping flaky
products with design defects (which needed user firmware upgrades or recalls)
and designing products whose specs looked good on paper - but which
didn't perform
consistently as well as its most demanding customers expected.

Intel
is not alone with this problem. There are plenty of other SSD companies in this
unenviable situation too. And the negative reputation SSD segment could
eventually include over 50% of companies in the market in 2010 / 2011. The
problems stem from pressures in the SSD Market Bubble.

Companies
need to ship products quickly to secure their place in their customers' mind
share. For less experienced SSD designers this means learning what the market
needs in a high volume production environment at internet speed - rather than
having the luxury of learning in small controlled environments during the years
when the market was smaller and your company didn't actually have an SSD plan.

Companies like Intel have the scale of resources where they may
survive trial and error product "experiments" due to their ability to
fix problems fast. But it's uncomfortable thinking that essential storage
hardware reliability might dip to the levels once seen in the PC software
market.

In October 2009 -
Intel joined the growing
roster of SSD companies who
have
announced
support for Trim functions. These benefit flash SSDs which don't have
internal fast active garbage collection. The company recommends users install
the firmware update and toolbox, and run the Trim function daily to ensure best
performance.

The most important thing is being included in
the list rather than the position within it. Having said that there's a 4x
difference in pageviews between companies at the top or bottom.

I
sometimes get emails from SSD product managers griping about the validity of
these lists. My reply is that it's a marketing reality they have to live
with. Just as being ranked #1 or #90 on Google could make a big difference to
your company - our SSD rankings have tracked millions of readers since
they started.

High rankings mean that more people in the market are
interested in learning more about what you're saying. On the other hand - if
your business plan is to be a leading shaker in the SSD market and your company
has never appeared in these lists - then you have an uphill struggle - and
success could take a lot longer than you think.